VERIFICATION OF A PROPOSED COMPUTATIONAL MODEL FOR AN OSCILLATING WATER COLUMN TYPE ENERGY CONVERTER CONSIDERING SEA STATE DATA
Sersana Sabedra de Oliveira1; Edis Antunes Pinto Junior1; Luciano Rodrigues1; Phelype Haron Oleinik1; Mateus das Neves Gomes2; Elizaldo Domingues dos Santos1; Luis Alberto Oliveira Rocha3; Wiliam Correa Marques1; Liércio André Isoldi1
1 Universidade Federal do Rio Grande; 2 Instituto Federal do Paraná; 3 Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos
doi:10.20906/CPS/CILAMCE2017-0607
Resumo
At a time when the electric power consumption has been discussed worldwide due to the problems arising from its generations, there is a great need to develop alternatives that lead to lower environmental impacts. Besides the renewable energies that are already in operation, there is one that has stood out due to its natural abundance, which is the conversion of sea wave energy into electricity. Currently there are several technologies that make this conversion, but none consolidated, and amongst them, the oscillating water column (OWC) device is, apparently, the most promising. The purpose of this research is the verification of a proposed computational model to simulate numerically the OWC device, being that this model is based on AR methodology, which considers only the converter and the air flow. In the verification process, comparisons will be made of the results obtained using the method under study with existing analytical and numerical solutions. For this purpose, suction and exhaustion conditions on the OWC device with different speed magnitudes will be considered. The analytical solution consists in using the continuity equation together with the mechanical energy equation for steady state flows with the purpose of calculating the pressure drop on the chamber. For the numerical solution, a two-dimensional computational domain of an OWC device with regular mesh generated by the GAMBIT® software will be considered. The numerical simulation will be in charge of the software ANSYS FLUENT® v. 14.0, which is based on the Finite Volume Method (FVM). For the pressure-velocity coupling, the PISO algorithm will be used; for the discretization of pressure, the PRESTO method; and for the advective terms, the first order Upwind scheme. Also, the turbulence model k - ε will be considered, and the solutions will be considered converged for 1x10-5 residuals. This study intends to conclude that the proposed numerical model was properly verified, and that it shows capacity for numerically simulating the fluid-dynamic
Palavras-chave: numerical simulation; Oscillating water column; verification